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It’s almost 2015! Many of us will make resolutions for the year, but in the education world a new calendar year most likely is a halfway point in the year. For me, it’s a great time to pause and check in on what I hoped to accomplish for the year, and think about what I still need to tackle. One of my big goals for the 2014-2015 school year was to “engage in global thinking and global collaboration”.

So far this year:

We collaborated with multiple schools for International Dot Day and used Google Drawing to create works of art with our collaborating schools.

We beta tested Wandoo Reader for Evanced and held Skype sessions to offer feedback on improving the tool for schools.

We exchanged our recycling problem with multiple schools during America Recycles week and brainstormed solutions for one another, while realizing that we all have recycling challenges as well as ideas for both recycling and reusing.

Our 4th grade pushed their explorers project out to the global audience and invited people to view and vote on the explorer perspectives that were offered

Joyce Valenza and I hosted a GlobalTL Google Hangout to encourage librarians to push the start button on global collaboration through multiple online communities including the GlobalTL Google Plus Community

What I know: I still have a lot of work to do! While I’ve had many collaborative experiences, I still feel like I’m just scratching the surface of something that could be much bigger and meaningful. I also know that I have lots of ideas, but I can’t expand those ideas alone. I need my professional learning network of global librarians to think, plan, and create with me.

Joyce Valenza and I will be hosting the 1st TL Virtual Cafe of 2015 on January 5th at 8PM EST. During our session, we plan to outline three levels of global collaboration.

This process might happen as a three-level taxonomy:

Introduction: We learn to use the tools for connection and share their affordances with learners, through engaging, though often one-shot, activities, like__Mystery Skypes__.

Inquiry: Guided by teachers and librarians, students engage in authentic partnerships to address issues and problems, engaged in curricular projects like__Flat Classroom__.

Independence: Students transfer use of the tools and strategies we’ve modeled, using hashtags to identify global experts, setting up their own investigatory conversations and events. They become citizen journalists, scientists, collaborative writers and creators, engaging in such projects as our Eyes Wide Open initiative.

Our children deserve teachers and librarians who are global. TLs who can plan meaningful global learning partnerships, connecting learners, classrooms and libraries through inquiry projects and expanding the possibilities of expanding the books we read.

Join us for what we hope will be a global conversation. We want this TL Cafe to not just be a presentation of success, but instead have it be an opportunity to ponder what we’ve tried and brainstorm new ideas for what we can do together as teacher librarians around the world.

One of my goals this year in our library is to foster global thinking and global collaboration. To connect with these types of opportunities for our students, I seek out connections on Twitter as well as in Google Plus communities such as GlobalTL and Connected Classrooms. I also offer opportunities within the projects taking place in my own school for other people around the world to join in.

This summer, I became involved in a conversation with Joyce Valenza, Shannon Miller, and Paul Fleischman about how books could live beyond the closing of the cover. What if a book inspired us to take action in the world? What would those actions look like around the globe? How could they be documented? How could they be shared? What would it look like if the author engaged in conversations about the actions being inspired by the book?

This September, Paul Fleischman’s book Eyes Wide Open: Going Beyond the Environmental Headlines was published. It’s a different kind of book because it doesn’t give our young people a prescriptive list of answers to solve the environmental problems of the world but instead to take an inquiry stance. It inspires our young people to listen closely to the environmental stories being shared about our world and to uncover stories of their own. It calls our young people to take action on those world problems and realize that even at a young age they can make a difference in our world.

We’re living in an Ah-Ha moment. Take 250 years of human ingenuity. Add abundant fossil fuels. The result: a population and lifestyle never before seen. The downsides weren’t visible for centuries, but now they are. Suddenly everything needs rethinking–suburbs, cars, fast food, cheap prices. It’s a changed world.

Eyes Wide Open explains it. Not with isolated facts, but the principles driving attitudes and events, from vested interests to denial to big-country syndrome. Because money and human behavior are as important as molecules in the environment, science is joined with politics, history, and psychology to give altitude on this unprecedented turning point. It’s a time of bold advances and shameful retreats, apathy and stunning innovation.

Also from Joyce’s blog, there’s a great list of ideas of how you might use Paul’s book with students.

What sort of reports might students contribute?

Take photos (and create a gallery) that document population rise or consumption levels or innovations being used to address these challenges. Attempt to document how your eggs, milk, farmed fish, and meat are made.

Make a video describing a local citizen science project. Document a plastic bag banning campaign, a local pollution issue, or your own attempt to go vegan for 30 days.

Interview someone in city government connected with water, transit, city planning, or emergency services. Or a biologist, park ranger, or science teacher. Or a religious leader whose church has taken a stand on the environment. Or your state senator, state assembly representative, or an aide to your congressperson. Or fellow students or neighbors to get a sense of how average citizens view the situation. Google+ Hangouts might be a perfect venue for archiving these interviews!

Write a description of one of your area’s key issues and how it’s being dealt with. Join with one or two others, each tackling one part of the project: research, interviewing, editing. Would your local newspaper be interested in the result?

Do a survey of your city, finding out where your water comes from, how your electricity is made, where your trash goes. Prepare to make many phone calls and to ask follow-up questions. More fun with a friend.

Annotate local newspaper stories, adding commentary that lets us see how the global trends and mental habits described in the book are playing out locally. Feel free to refine my thinking.

Remix media and create digital stories around an area of local interest.

Inspire a meme to invite continual, global reinterpretation around an environmental prompt

Submit a field report. Work prepared for school assignment is fine. Take time to review and revise. Once you’ve posted it on Google Docs, YouTube, or another platform that all can access, send a description to fieldreports@eyeswideopenupdates.com. Include a bit about yourself, how you came to the topic, and a photo of yourself or something connected to the report. If Paul finds it well done, he will add it to the roster, put a pin in the map, and maybe even give it a shout out in his blog.

Connected librarians have a huge opportunity with this book and the many communities that are available to us. We are the people within our buildings who work with every student, teacher, and family member within our school. If we collaborate, then we connect our entire school communities with one another.

November 15 is America Recycles Day. The week of November 10-14 would be a great week for us to begin to connect our voices with one another around an issue that really affects us globally. Paul’s amazing book Eyes Wide Open could be a piece that we could use to spark conversations around the globe. It could also be paired with a plethora of other picture books and informational texts on environmental action. More than a conversation, our connections could push our young students to take action in our world, and those initial connections could lead to a continued connection between schools around the world in the name of environmental action.

Here’s what I hope to do:

Connect with schools throughout the week of November 10-14 via Skype or Google Hangouts

Read an environmental text together

Have each school identify and explain an environmental issue in our school or community. For us, it will most likely be the amount of waste being thrown away in our classrooms.

Have each school exchange their issue and brainstorm possible next steps for one another. Wouldn’t it be nice to hand your problem over to someone for a few minutes to see the problem through their eyes? That perspective might be the very thing you need in order to take a next step in your problem.

Share our brainstorming with one another and document suggestions in a digital format such as a Google doc or Padlet.

Commit to reconnect at some point to share what actions we have taken, what has been successful, or what new problems have surfaced.

Let’s do more than just connect our students for a day. Let’s connect our students to work on an issue that has an impact on our world. As part of Connected Educators Month, let’s start thinking of how we can connect our students in meaningful ways throughout the year and begin planning those connections now.

As you make connections, create action steps, and make an impact on your world, share it!